Software engineer Bo Bayles has spent the last couple years plumbing the code of his favorite Saturn game, Burning Rangers, for secret art assets, passwords and more. SHIRO! last checked in with Bayles early this year when he uncovered a co-op mode in a beta build of Burning Rangers. But in the last week he’s turned his attention to Sonic Team’s earliest Saturn game, Nights into Dreams.
Bayles said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Burning Rangers and Nights use the same memory address for selecting which level to play. Changing the value at memory address 0x060FFC15 allows for Nights’ two playable characters, Elliot and Claris, to play each other’s levels.
He also found previously undocumented debug features. On the dream select screen, setting a particular byte in memory gives access to every level immediately. And if you hold the right trigger button when selecting a dream, you jump to that dream’s boss fight.
Bayles even provided an Action Replay code to try it out for yourself: 360FFC95 0002.
Debug mode also enables the ability to pause the game and press the X button to complete the course immediately. Bayles demonstrated that in a video:
But that’s not the only trick Bayles revealed for Action Replay cartridges. One code gives infinite time to continue a link: 16019F3C 0009.
Another makes the overall level’s timer roll over to full when it hits zero: 060FFC95 0001.
Still another code, 060FFC3F 00FF, makes the split screen feature work on any boss stage, although you can only play against a second player in Reala’s stage.
He even found some sillier things, like unused functionality that allows the second controller to spin Elliot and Claris around on the dream select screen.
Or that the mirror effect from the Puffy boss fight and Soft Museum can work anywhere.
Bayles was able to play around with the Christmas Nights demo disc, too, where he showed off swapping models so that Elliot and Claris could use Sonic’s animations and Sonic could fly like Nights.
He also gave an Action Replay code to change Sonic’s boss to Gillwing — set 06044DDA to E001 to check it out.
Another demo disc holds a secret, too. Bayles found that the pre-release Nights into Dreams Special Sampler has an unused powerup that adds time to a level’s timer. It looks like the big red clock inside a cracked-open egg that chases Elliot and Claris when they spend too much time reaching the Ideya Palace to switch to Nights during a stage.
He changed the memory address 0x060B0000 to the value 0x0603F888 to replace all the blue chips in each of the demo’s levels with the extra time powerup.
And while it may be generally common knowledge, it’s worth mentioning that Bayles confirmed after probing Christmas Nights’ code that these are the dates that are special to the game:
- Jan 1 through Jan 10
- Jan 11 through Feb 19
- Mar 1 through Oct 31
- April 1
- Nov 1 through Nov 24
- Nov 25 through Dec 25
- Dec 24 at 12:00 through Dec 25
- Dec 26 through Dec 31
Huge thanks to Bo Bayles for doing all this tinkering and making it pubic, and for taking all the screenshots and videos that we’ve included in this story. For those interested in reading Bayles’ extensive research on Burning Rangers, he wrote a series of articles on his blog.
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
was hoping for a selph clue.